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All posts for the month July, 2015

Recently the communication from the Federal Reserve seems to have become more hawkish. It all started on July 15 when Fed chair Janet Yellen testified in front of the House Financial Services Committee. Yellen among other things said:

“If the economy evolves as we expect, economic conditions likely would make it appropriate at some point this year to raise the federal funds rate target”

This has been followed by comments from other Fed officials such as St. Louis Fed president James Bullard who in an interview with Fox TV on July 20 said that there was a “50% probability” a September rate hike. As my loyal readers know I like to watch the markets to assess monetary conditions. So lets see what the markets are saying about the US monetary policy stance right now – and how it has changed on the back of Yellen and Bullard’s comments. Lets start with the much talked about gold price. It is hard to miss that it was Yellen’s hawkish comments that has sent gold prices down in recent weeks. So the drop in gold prices certainly is a indication that US monetary conditions are getting tighter. But it would of course be wrong to reason from the change in one price. We need more – so how about the dollar? This is the so-called Dollar Index (DXY). Here the picture certainly is less clear than from the gold price. In fact the dollar index today is more or less a the same level as on July 15 when Yellen hinted at a rate hike this year.

However, we should remember that the exchange rate is telling us something about the relative monetary policy, so if US monetary conditions is in fact getting tighter and the dollar index is flat then it is an indication that monetary conditions are also getting tighter outside of the US. Given the Greek crisis and Chinese growth worries this is not an unreasonable assumption.

So how about inflation expectations? This is 2-year/2-year inflation expectations (so basically the expectation to the average inflation rate from August 2017 to August 2019) Again the picture is clear – after Yellen and Bullard’s comments 2y/2y inflation expectations have dropped and equally important this happened at a time when inflation expectations already where below 2%. It should also be noted that prediction markets are telling the same story. Hence, from some time Hypermind’s market for nominal GDP growth in 2015 has been somewhat below 4% (which I believe has been Fed’s unannounced target for some time – see here.) The Fed is too hawkish and rate hikes should be postponed Concluding, the Fed’s more hawkish rhetoric has de facto led to a tightening of US monetary conditions already, which has pushed inflation expectations below the Fed’s own 2% inflation target. So effectively the markets are tellling the Fed that monetary conditions are becoming too tight and a September rate hike as suggested by advocated by Bullard would be premature. So if I was on the FOMC I would certainly vote against any rate hike in the present situation.

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If you want to hear me speak about these topics or other related topics don’t hesitate to contact my speaker agency Specialist Speakers – e-mail: roz@specialistspeakers.com.

The escalation of the greek crisis recently has made me think about the connection between the economic development, austerity and political uncertainty. Unfortunately we don’t have a commonly accepted measure of political uncertainty or political instability.

However, I got an idea to make a simple measure of political instability in Europe. My idea is simply to count the total number of Prime Ministers, Finance Ministers and central bank governors a given country have had in a given period. A high number would indicate a high level of political instability.

The graph below shows this measure for 30 European countries since January 2009.

I have not done any deep analysis of the data so I am cautious not to make any strong conclusions based on what I have so far.

However, there is a few things I would note:

1) Greece by has been by far the most politically unstable country among the 30 European countries during the Great Recession.

2) All other countries are essentially within one standard deviation of the mean ranking.

3) There is no major differences between the political stability of countries with floating exchange rates relative to euro countries (and peggers).

4) Spain, Portugal and Ireland alle have been surprisingly politically stable during the Great Recession. Among the PIIGS only Italy comes close to the kind of political instability we have seen in Greece.

5) It isn’t surprising that Great Britain, Luxembourg, Sweden and Germany are among the most politically stable countries in the Europe.

6) However, Poland and Turkey have been remarkably stable in political terms. This will likely be a surprise to most people. Given what is happening in Turkish politics and recently geopolitical and military events the ranking could certainly be questioned.

7) Denmark and Finland have been surprisingly unstable politically during the Great Recession.

Obviously this is a very simple measure of political instability and if one want to use the ranking more work on the index would be needed.

For example, it is obviously that we might be more interested in looking at the change in the index rather than on the level of the index. Furthermore, some countries are likely “structurally” more stable than other countries. Should we account for that in some way?

Finally I have not taken into account differences in electoral systems in different countries. That likely distort the data.

BREAKING NEWS! I have found a comment from Milton Friedman on the present Greek crisis in, which he expresses, his sympathies for Syriza supporters:

It is not the announced intention of our present arrangements, or of any of the various proposals for strengthening international monetary cooperation, to delegate significant political power over internal economic policy to foreign central bankers or officials of an international agency. But that is unquestionably their effect.

That this is a very real issue was illustrated dramatically by the recent experience of the Greeks, just after the Syrizagovernment came into power. Personally, I disagree sharply with the particular policies that the newly elected Syriza government apparently wishes to follow, and regard the policy changes imposed on Greece by the EU as the price of the rescue of euro membership as very likely far better for Greece itself.

Yet that does not alter the fact thatGreek internal policy was shaped by officials who were not responsible to the Greek electorate and in directions that had not emerged through the regular political process. In this respect, I find myself in complete sympathy with those Syriza supporters who regard it as nearly intolerable that the “gnomes in Brussels” should have a veto power over internal Greek economic policy.

Ok, I cheated. This is really from Friedman’s paper “The Political Economy of International Monetary Arrangements” from 1965 (re-printed in “Dollars and Deficits”, 1968, see page 272) and I have altered the text slightly (the bold text is my changes).

Originally it was about “Britain” rather than “Greece” and “Labour” rather than “Syriza” and the ‘gnomes’ were from “Zürich” rather than from “Brussels”.

But the lesson is the same – In-Optimal Currency Union will lead to balance of payments crisis, which will necessitate an income transfer from the centre to the periphery, which in turn will lead to the demand for political centralisation.

Britain felt the consequences of that within the Bretton Woods system in 1964. Greece is facing similar consequences today as a result of euro membership.

It seems like policy makers in Europe are totally incapable of understanding and learning anything from monetary history. Do I need to remind anybody what happened with the Bretton Woods system?

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If you want to hear me speak about these topics or other related topics don’t hesitate to contact my speaker agency Specialist Speakers – e-mail: daniel@specialistspeakers.com or roz@specialistspeakers.com.

Tonight I have been on Bloomberg TV talking to Alix Steel and Joe Weisenthal about Finland and the euro. See my interview here.

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If you want to hear me speak about these topics or other related topics don’t hesitate to contact my speaker agency Specialist Speakers – e-mail: daniel@specialistspeakers.com or roz@specialistspeakers.com.

There was a time when the Scandinavian countries had a currency union of their own. However, today the Nordic countries have chosen difference monetary regimes. Sweden, Norway and Iceland have floating exchange rates and inflation targeting, while Finland has joined the euro zone and Denmark is pegging the krone to the euro.

So essentially we have three countries – the floaters – which have monetary sovereignty to set monetary conditions to achieve their stated monetary policy objectives and two – the peggers – which have given up monetary sovereignty and have “outsourced” monetary policy to the ECB in Frankfurt.

How has that played out during the Great Recession? The graph low give you a hint. The floaters are gren and the peggers are red.

There are obviously many reasons why the countries have performed so differently, but it is hard not to conclude that the monetary policy regimes have played a very important role in the length and depth of the crisis in each of the five Nordic countries.

By the way if you want a proper empirical analysis of the difference in performance of the floaters and peggers during the Great Recession then you should read this paper byThomas Barnebaek,Nikolaj Malchow-Møller and Jens Nordvig.

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If you want to hear me speak about these topics or other related topics don’t hesitate to contact my speaker agency Specialist Speakers – e-mail: daniel@specialistspeakers.com or roz@specialistspeakers.com.

In my earlier post The Euro – A Fatal Conceit I argued that had the euro not be introduced and had we instead had freely floating exchange rates then “European taxpayers would (not) have had to pour billions of euros into bailing out Southern European and Eastern European government”. Said in another way had we not had the euro then there would not have been a European “debt crisis” or at least it would have been significantly smaller.

A simple way of illustrating this is to have a look at the debt development in the euro countries (and the countries pegged to the euro) and comparing that with the debt development in the European countries with floating exchange rates.

The graph below shows the development in (median) gross public debt (% of GDP) in the two groups of countries. (All countries are hence equally weighted).

The picture is very clear – while both the floaters and the euro countries saw their public debt ratios increase sharply on the back of the 2008 shock (albeit less extremely for the floaters than for the euro countries) – from 2011 there is a very clear difference in the debt development.

Hence, from 2011 the floaters have seen as seen a gradual decline in gross public debt (as share of GDP), while the euro countries (and the peggers) have seen a steep increase in public indebtedness.

So while the floaters have seen their public debt increase by just above 10% of GDP from 2007 to 2014 the euro countries have seen a rise in public debt of more than 25% of GDP!

The graph below shows the individual breakdown of the data.

Again the picture is very clear – the euro countries (and the euro peggers) have had significantly more negative debt dynamics than the European floaters. Even if we disregard the PIIGS countries then the euro countries are on average doing a lot worse than the floaters in terms of public debt dynamics .

The euro countries are trying harder, but are succeeding less

One could of course argue that the difference in debt development simply reflects that some countries are just less prudent than other. However, the graph below shows that this is not a very good explanation.

The graph shows the annual change in the fiscal stance (measured as the annual change in IMF’s estimate for the structural public balance as share of GDP). Positive (negative) values are a fiscal easing (tightening).

A few interesting conclusions emerge. First of all overall both euro countries and floaters seem to have had rather pro-cyclical fiscal policies – hence, both groups of countries eased fiscal policy in the ‘good years’ (2005-2009), but tightened the fiscal stance in the ‘bad years’ (2010-14.)

Second, it is notable that the fiscal stance of the euro countries and the floaters is highly correlated and is of a similar magnitude.

So even if the fiscal stance has an impact on growth in both groups of countries it seems a bit far-fetched to in general attribute the difference in real GDP growth between the two groups of countries to difference in the fiscal stance. That said, it seems like overall the euro countries and peggers have had a slightly more austere fiscal stance than the floaters after 2010. (Some – like Greece of course have seen a massive tightening of fiscal policy.)

This of course makes it even more paradoxical that the euro countries have had a significantly more negative debt dynamics than the floaters.

It is not a debt crisis – it is an NGDP crisis

So we can conclude that the reason that the euro countries’ debt dynamics are a lot worse than the floaters is not because of less fiscal austerity, but rather the problem seems to be one of lacking growth in the euro countries. The graph below illustrates that.

The graph plots the debt dynamics against the growth of nominal GDP from 2007 to 2014 for all 31 countries (both euro countries and the floaters).

The graph clearly shows that the countries, which have seen a sharp drop in nominal GDP such as Ireland and Greece have also seen the steepest increasing the public debt ratios. In fact Greece is nearly exactly on the estimated regression line, which implies that Greece has done exactly as good or bad as would be expected given the steep drop in Greek NGDP. This leaves basically no room for a ‘fiscal irresponsibility’ explanation for the rise in Greek public debt after 2007.

This of course nearly follows by definition – as we define the debt ratio as nominal public debt divided by nominal GDP. So when the denominator (nominal GDP) drops it follows by definition that the (debt) ratio increases. Furthermore, we also know that public sector expenditure (such as unemployment benefits) and tax revenues tend to be rather sensitive to changes in nominal GDP growth.

As a consequence we can conclude that the so-called ‘Europe debt crisis’ really is not about lack of fiscal austerity, but rather a result of too little nominal GDP growth.

And who controls NGDP growth? Well, overall NGDP growth in the euro zone is essentially under the full control of the ECB (remember MV=PY). This means that too tight monetary policy will lead to too weak NGDP growth, which in turn will cause an increase in public debt ratios.

In that regard it is worth noticing that it is hardly a coincidence that the ECB’s two unfortunate rate hikes in 2011 also caused a sharp slowdown in NGDP growth in certain euro zone countries, which in turn caused a sharp rise in public debt ratios as the first graph of this post clearly shows.

Consequently it would not be totally incorrect to claim that Jean-Claude Trichet as ECB-chief in 2011 played a major role in dramatically escalating the European debt crisis.

Had he not hiked interest rates in 2011 and instead pursued a policy of quantitative easing to get NGDP growth back on track then it seems a lot less likely that we would have seen the sharp increase in public debt ratios we have seen since 2011.

Of course that is not the whole story as the ECB does only control overall euro zone NGDP growth, but not the NGDP growth of individual euro zone countries. Rather the relative NGDP growth performance within the euro is determined by other factors such as particularly the initial external imbalances (the current account situation) when the shocks hit in 2008 (Lehman Brothers’ collapse) and 2011 (Trichet’s hikes.)

Hence, if a country like Greece with a large current account deficit is hit by a “funding shock” as in 2008 and 2011 then the country will have to have an internal devaluation (lower prices and lower wage growth) and the only way to achieve that is essentially through a deep recession.

However, that is not the case for countries with a floating exchange rate as a floating exchange country with a large current account deficit does not have to go through a recession to restore competitiveness – it just has to see a depreciation of its currency as Turkey as seen since 2008-9.

Concluding, the negative debt dynamics in the euro zone since 2008 are essentially the result of two things. 1) The misguided rate hikes in 2011 and 2) the lack of ability for countries with large current account deficits to see a nominal exchange rate depreciation.

The Euro is Fiscal Strangulation Mechanism, but for monetary reasons

We can therefore conclude that the euro indeed has been a Fiscal Strangulation Mechanism as fiscal austerity has not been enough to stabilize the overall debt dynamics in a numbers of euro zone countries.

However, this is only the case because the ECB has first of all failed to offset the fiscal austerity by maintaining nominal stability (hitting its own inflation target) and second because countries, which initially had large current account deficits like Greece and Spain have not – contrary to the floaters – been able to restore competitiveness (and domestic demand) through a depreciation of their currencies as they essentially are “pegged” within the euro zone.

PS I have excluded Croatia from the data set as it is unclear whether to describe the Croatian kuna as a dirty float or a dirty peg. Whether or not Croatia is included in the sample does not change the conclusions.

Update: My friend Nicolas Goetzmann pointed out the Trichet ECB also hiked interest rates in 2008 and hence dramatically misjudged the situation. I fully agree with that, but my point in this post is not necessarily to discuss that episode, but rather to discuss the fiscal implications of the ECB’s failures and the problem of the euro itself.

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If you want to hear me speak about these topics or other related topics don’t hesitate to contact my speaker agency Specialist Speakers – e-mail: daniel@specialistspeakers.com or roz@specialistspeakers.com.

In my previous post I claimed that the ‘Greek crisis’ essentially is not about Greece, but rather that the crisis is a symptom of a bigger problem namely the euro itself.

Furthermore, I claimed that had it not been for the euro we would not have had to have massive bailouts of countries and we would not have been in a seven years of recession in the euro zone and unemployment would have been (much) lower if we had had floating exchange rates in across Europe instead of what we could call the Monetary Strangulation Mechanism (MSM).

It is of course impossible to say how the world would have looked had we had floating exchange rates instead of the MSM. However, luckily not all countries in Europe have joined the euro and the economic performance of these countries might give us a hint about how things could have been if we had never introduced the euro.

So I have looked at the growth performance of the euro countries as well as on the European countries, which have had floating (or quasi-floating) exchange rates to compare ‘peggers’ with ‘floaters’.

My sample is the euro countries and the countries with fixed exchange rates against the euro (Bulgaria and Denmark) and countries with floating exchange rates in the EU – the UK, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Romania. Furthermore, I have included Switzerland as well as the EEA countries – Norway and Iceland (all with floating exchange rates). Finally I have included Greece’s neighbour Turkey, which also has a floating exchange rate.

In all 31 European countries – all very different. Some countries are political dysfunctional and struggling with corruption (for example Romania or Turkey), while others are normally seen as relatively efficient economies with well-functioning labour and product markets and strong external balance and sound public finances like Denmark, Finland and the Netherland.

Overall we can differentiate between two groups of countries – euro countries and euro peggers (the ‘red countries’) and the countries with more or less floating exchange rates (the ‘green countries’).

The graph below shows the growth performance for these two groups of European countries in the period from 2007 (the year prior to the crisis hit) to 2015.

The difference is striking – among the 21 euro countries (including the two euro peggers) nearly half (10) of the countries today have lower real GDP levels than in 2007, while all of the floaters today have higher real GDP levels than in 2007.

Even Iceland, which had a major banking collapse in 2008 and the always politically dysfunctionally and highly indebted Hungary (both with floating exchange rates) have outgrown the majority of euro countries (and euro peggers).

In fact these two countries – the two slowest growing floaters – have outgrown the Netherlands, Denmark and Finland – countries which are always seen as examples of reform-oriented countries with über prudent policies and strong external balances and healthy public finances.

If we look at a simple median of the growth rates of real GDP from 2007 until 2015 the floaters have significantly outgrown the euro countries by a factor of five (7.9% versus 1.5%). Even if we disregard the three fastest floaters (Turkey, Romania and Poland) the floaters still massively outperform the euro countries (6.5% versus 1.5%).

The crisis would have long been over had the euro not been introduced

To me there can be no doubt – the massive growth outperformance for floaters relative to the euro countries is no coincidence. The euro has been a Monetary Strangulation Mechanism and had we not had the euro the crisis in Europe would likely long ago have been over. In fact the crisis is essentially over for most of the ‘floaters’.

We can debate why the euro has been such a growth killing machine – and I will look closer into that in coming posts – but there is no doubt that the crisis in Europe today has been caused by the euro itself rather than the mismanagement of individual economies.

PS I am not claiming the structural factors are not important and I do not claim that all of the floaters have had great monetary policies. The only thing I claim is the the main factor for the underperformance of the euro countries is the euro itself.

PPS one could argue that the German ‘D-mark’ is freely floating and all other euro countries essentially are pegged to the ‘D-mark’ and that this is the reason for Germany’s significant growth outperformance relative to most of the other euro countries.

Update: With this post I have tried to demonstrate that the euro does not allow nominal adjustments for individual euro countries and asymmetrical shocks therefore will have negative effects. I am not making an argument about the long-term growth outlook for individual euro countries and I am not arguing that the euro zone forever will be doomed to low growth. The focus is on how the euro area has coped with the 2008 shock and the the aftermath. However, some have asked how my graph would look if you go back to 2000. Tim Lee has done the work for me – and you will see it doesn’t make much of a difference to the overall results. See here.

If you want to hear me speak about these topics or other related topics don’t hesitate to contact my speaker agency Specialist Speakers – e-mail: daniel@specialistspeakers.com or roz@specialistspeakers.com.

Imagine that the euro had never been introduced and we instead had had freely floating European currencies and each country would have been free to choose their own monetary policy and fiscal policy.

Some countries would have been doing well; others would have been doing bad, but do you seriously think that we would had a crisis as deep as what we have seen over the past seven years in Europe?

Do you think Greek GDP would have dropped 30%?

Do you think Finlandwould have seen a bigger accumulated drop in GDP than during the Great Depression and during the banking crisis of 1990s?

Do you think that European taxpayers would have had to pour billions of euros into bailing out Southern European and Eastern European governments? And German and French banks! (I elaborate on this here.)

Do you think that Europe would have been as disunited as we are seeing it now?

Do you think we would have seen the kind of hostilities among European nations as we are seeing now?

Do you think we would have seen the rise of political parties like Golden Dawn and Syriza in Greece or Podemos in Spain?

Do you think anti-immigrant sentiment and protectionist ideas would have been rising across Europe to the extent it has?

Do you think that the European banking sector would have been quasi paralyzed for seven years?

And most importantly do you think we would have had 23 million unemployed Europeans?

The answer to all of these questions is NO!

We would have been much better off without the euro. The euro is a major economic, financial, political and social fiasco.

It is disgusting and I blame the politicians of Europe and the Eurocrats for this and I blame the economists who failed to speak out against the dangers of introducing the euro and instead gave their support to a project so economically insane that it only could have been envisioned by the type of people the British historian Paul Johnson called “Intellectuals”.

And don’t say you where not warned. Milton Friedman had warned you that forced monetary integration would cause political disunity and would be an economic disaster. He was of course right.

Bernard Connolly who wrote the book “The Rotten Heart of Europe” warned against exactly what is going on right now. Nobody wanted to listen. In fact Bernard Connolly was sacked from the European Commission in 1995 for speaking his mind.

The sacking of Bernard Connolly unfortunate is telling of lack of debate about monetary policy matters in Europe. Any opposition to the “project” is silenced. The greater “good” always comes first.

There have only been referendums about euro adoption in a few countries. In Denmark and Sweden the electorate have been wise enough to go against the “orders” of the euro establishment. As a consequence both countries today are better off than if the electorate had followed the orders of the elite and voted ‘yes’ to euro adoption.

It is easy to understand the frustration of the European voters. They have been lied to. Unfortunately the outcome is that voters across Europe now are happy to vote for parties like Front Nation, UKIP, Podemos and Syriza. I ask you the cheerleaders of the euro project – is this what you wanted?

I can only say that I can understand the Greek population’s anger over seven years of economic and social hardship and I likewise can understand that the taxpayers of Finland don’t want to pay for yet another meaningless bailout of Greece. But you should not blame each other. You should blame the European politicians who brought you into the euro.

Blame the eurocrats who never understood Hayek’s dictum from his great book “The Fatal Conceit”:

“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”

If you want to hear me speak about these topics or other related topics don’t hesitate to contact my speaker agency Specialist Speakers – e-mail: daniel@specialistspeakers.com or roz@specialistspeakers.com.

In 2001 Turkey was forced by a major crisis to abandon it’s managed/crawling peg regime and instead introduced a floating exchange rate regime and the Turkish central bank introduced an inflation targeting regime.

14 years later Turkey is still in many ways politically dysfunctional – in fact it has gotten worse in recent years – there has been rumours of plans of military coups, there has been major corruption scandals even involving the Prime Minister (now president Erdogan) and the governing AKParty and lately the civil war in Syria has created a massive inflow of refugees and increased tensions with Turkish Kurdish population.

All this has to a large extent been reflected in the value of the Turkish lira, which have been highly volatile since 2001 – and increasingly so since 2008, but the floating exchange rate regime means that we have not seen the same kind of volatility in the domestic Turkish economy, which was so common prior to 2001.

While Turkey in 2001 floated the lira Greece gave up having a monetary policy of its own and instead joined the euro. We know the story – while the first years of euro membership in general was deemed succesfull that hardly has been the case since 2008: The economy has collapsed, unemployment increased dramatically, debt has skyrocketed, we effectively have had sovereign default and we are on the brink of an euro exit.

Milton Friedman used to say “never underestimate the importance of luck of nations” referring to how pegged exchange regimes might be succesfull for a while, but also that it could have catastrophic consequence to maintain a pegged exchange rate regime.

In 2008 Greece ran out of luck because it made the fatal decision to join the euro in 2001. Today is it blatantly obvious that Greece should have done as Turkey and floated the drachma. It now seems like after 14 years Greece will be forced by a major crisis to do exactly that.

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If you want to hear me speak about these topics or other related topics don’t hesitate to contact my speaker agency Specialist Speakers – e-mail: daniel@specialistspeakers.com or roz@specialistspeakers.com.